Gnome Archive

Edd Dumbill, valuable member and developer of the GNOME Desktop Environment, author of the "Mono: A Developer's Notebook" book, speaks up his mind about GNOME in one of his recent blog entries.

I have written an article for my O'Reilly Weblog called Remixing how we use the Open Source desktop discussion a design to better integrate software together within the umbrella of a project. With a particular focus on GNOME, the article seeks to present a means of making the desktop more useful when applied within the common 'project' setting.

Today I thought about how I can make my very own application to only link against those libraries that it really requires and not those it get provided by PKG-CONFIG.

As most OSNews readers know, I got into a spat with the Gnome developers last week, which culminated in my publishing of an angry editorial, which sparked a firestorm of controversy. On one hand, the controversy was positive, because it introduced a lot of people to the fact that many people believe that Gnome developers have not had an effective channel to receive and interpret feedback from users. But on the other hand, the controversy had the negative effect of inflaming passions, putting everyone's guard up, and perhaps even widening the gulf between those who love Gnome but want a voice in its future, and those who hold its future in their hands. This effect was unintentional, and I would like to apologize for any damage I might have done to the project.

Red Hat engineers announced today that the very popular ClearLooks theme engine will probably be the default theme for the Gnome 2.12. The theme was developed by Richard Stellingwerff helped out by Daniel "Spark" Borgmann, others, and with some help from myself on the usability side. This was a much needed refresh of the Gnome default desktop (old theme, new theme screenshots). Hopefully, a more usable variant of the Winter-Bold window manager theme (get matching colors, on-mouse-overs, don't get so greyed out when unfocused, buttons better vertically centered etc) will make it in as the companion of ClearLooks on Gnome instead of the currently bundled (and not as sexy) Industrial. Update: Elsewhere, GTK+ 2.6.3 was released, with bug fixes mainly for the Win32 platform.

This is a brief introduction to Gnome optimization, both the hows and the whys. Details of individual tools and techniques are left for later articles, but a collection of hints and tricks is provided. Update: GNOME 2.10 Beta 2 is the first pre-release intended for wide public scrutiny before the final release.